Whenever I have to brave the Google abyss, I usually use Startpage. Obviously uBlock Origin but if I can avoid being bombarded by devious and distracting ads altogether, I’d rather that.
True but I see this more as a critical thinking problem - which is pervasive in our society and worsened by the tech bubbles. People should want to seek out information that both argues for and against a topic.
The way our education systems work now, at least in the US, that method of thinking only begins around college and varies widely by academic pedigree.
I don’t run VPNs at the router level. The speed and latency hit, plus the spambot triggers aren’t worth it for me. This is purely a non-privacy minded preference, mind you, and I’m totally not an expert.
You bring up a good point though. Regardless of what’s running upstream, if my device is running private relay, it all gets bypassed. So I have to disable private relay.
My preference is to run nextdns over DoH, AdGuard locally on iOS + Stop the Madness, and a VPN when I’m feeling sheepish.
On iOS, I’ve tried quite a few combinations and I’ve gotten feedback from users with others.
When I ran pi-hole or AdGuard home, I also used AdGuard on all my iOS devices - both the DNS pseudo-VPN and safari extensions cause otherwise ads would sneak in. The Adguard app removes the annoying ads from Apple News and NYT apps.
Now I just use NextDNS and the same AdGuard iOS app setup.
I was going to binge purchase off Temu at one point - inexpensive junk stuff to tickle my fancy. But in good conscience, I just couldn’t. It’s wasted money on stuff I don’t trust made by exploited workers or knocked off patents that ends up in a landfill.
Would I confidently let my kids play with the toys and tchotchkes? I don’t even buy stuff for them from Amazon cause of all the counterfeit and toxic crap. I know some consumers have to be extra price conscious. It sucks that they’re relegated to crap quality products that are less durable and essentially more disposable (not to say that better quality junk isn’t disposable junk in modern times).
Oh! I’ll have to watch that. Hadn’t realized Apple toys with this theme quite a bit. Constellation had so much promise but it flamed out for me. Severance might be tangentially related with the theme, compartmentalized lives, being equally fascinating.
Mr. Robot and Counterpart did things to my brain questioning reality.
Yup. I quit everything but Reddit several years back without a second thought in all that time because I lived in a big metropolitan city.
Now I live in a small suburb where all the towns and businesses post to FB, neighbors have tradeposts and active interest groups on there, the schools and Police post info there too. My wife has connected to “friends” we otherwise wouldn’t exchange info with.
All that has had me wanting to create a new account - just to connect. I was completely ignorant to the role it plays outside of big cities beforehand. Nextdoor is a really crappy alternative.
Speaking of. On an off chance, I went to BK a few days ago and got a Whopper. Like $12 for the meal, and just like the other fast food chains, the patty was so thin I couldn’t taste anything besides the bun, ketchup and mayo.
Pretty much cured me of any further fast food spending. What a scam!
When I put the pop-up stopper in, the drain flows much slower than without it. And! Without the pop-up stopper installed, I’ve never had the smell or slime. I hadn’t put two and two together.
I guess what threw me is that it’s happened with two separate (but similar) drain assemblies. Maybe I’ll try installing a grid style assembly. That might do the trick.
Thank you so much! I’ve been trying to solve this mystery for well over a year.
as a pre-schooler non-social media parent, this is fucking hilarious.